Alois Nashali has recovered from COVID-19. He has been cleared to go back to work from Ottawa Public Health, but still told to maintain distance. Tony Caldwell / Postmedia

Alois Nashali, unlike many of those in long-term care homes, where COVID-19 is ravaging patient populations, is fully recovered from the virus.

The first Ottawa Amazon employee to contract the novel coronavirus is speaking out as a cautionary tale to young people to heed the warnings from public health officials and to know that it’s not just the elderly who are getting sick.

But 22-year-old Alois Nashali, unlike many of those in long-term care homes, where COVID-19 is ravaging patient populations, is fully recovered from the virus.

It was on March 19, the same day he worked his last shift at the Carlsbad Springs fulfillment centre, that he started to feel unwell.

“I didn’t have all the coronavirus symptoms. I had a little bit of a dry cough and that was it. They couldn’t test me if I didn’t have enough symptoms to show if it’s something close to corona,” he said.

“I decided to self-isolate by then.”

That meant taking unpaid leave from his job at the Boundary Road facility where he has worked in quality and inventory control since August 2019. He was among the second group of people hired on to work at the facility, which opened in the summer of 2019.

It was a prudent decision to stay home from work. On March 31, he woke up feeling like he’d never felt before.

“I had a fever, and my body was feeling very fatigued,” he said.

“At first, I just thought I had a flu, but I could just feel like this is something else because I’ve had the flu before. I was actually in pain: all my joints, my back, my knees. I couldn’t get out of my bed. It just came like that. It just came all at once. I just woke up and found all these symptoms.”

He went to the COVID-19 testing facility at Brewer Park.

“I explained my situation and they decided to give me a test, and the results came back on April 3, and it was positive.”

A nurse phoned him to give him his result and asked how he was feeling; at that moment he was having pretty severe chest pain and was told to call 911 or to go to the nearest emergency room. He went to the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital, where he was told his pain was from inflammation. He was told to continue taking Tylenol and to isolate from others in his house.

Nashali lives with his two brothers. The three boys, along with his mother and two sisters, immigrated to Canada from Kenya in 2016.

He told his employer that same day and within 24 hours Amazon notified all employees at its YOW1, a facility of nearly one million square feet , that the site had its first positive COVID case. The company has called continually to check in on Nashali and his health.

After he was diagnosed, Nashali was starting to feel better, but then he would find his symptoms worsening.

“At night, all the symptoms would hit me again. The nights were nightmares,” he said.

His fever would spike, but, with no thermometer in the house, he can’t even say how high, just that he felt like he was “boiling.”

“If you have headache, fever, chest pain, imagine having all those symptoms at once. I’ve never been that sick before,” he said.

Nashali has no idea where he might’ve contracted the virus, but believes it was community transfer. He hadn’t travelled anywhere and, at the time he first started feeling unwell, he was only going to work and the grocery store. Public health officials know now that asymptomatic transfer is possible with people getting the virus from others who weren’t even presenting as sick.

His sense of smell and taste, which disappeared a few days after he was tested for the virus, have returned, too. He noticed those symptoms while he was eating meat and potatoes, and, despite the meal being seasoned, it tasted bland.

“Imagine a food with no salt,” he said.

Nashali had a misconception that there wasn’t a health risk to people like him. He now knows how wrong he was.

“I think what people should know, especially young people like me, they shouldn’t make assumptions that they are strong, healthy and young and, ‘I can’t get this infection.’ Because, for me, that was the last thing I was thinking about, for me to be a victim of the virus. I just want them to know it could happen to anybody, if it happened to me. We just have to take the precautions. Stay home and maybe we can reduce the spread.”

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